She sleeps like a dead weight now beside me, lowered into the night, the ropes of the day swaying around her. We know nothing about each other really. She does not know how often my ex-lover visits me ... [+]
The black man who approached from the rear of the gathering at my father's burial looked to be one hundred years old. He was frail, but not bent. He walked haltingly, supported by two black teenagers, one on either side of him. As my family members and my father's friends watched, puzzled, the man and his young escorts continued around the edge of the group of mourners toward my father's casket that lay beside the dug hole and the cemetery workers ready to lower it into the ground. Through my grief-fogged brain, I saw a much younger face superimposed over the face of the old man so determined